“Popular Sovereignty in Early Modern Jesuit Thought,” in William McCormick, S.J. and Matthew Baugh S. J., eds., Jesuits and Politics (Chestnut Hill, MA: Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies) (forthcoming)
This chapter demonstrates that the early modern Jesuits, particularly Francisco Suárez and Luis de Molina, defended a theory of popular sovereignty. Contrary to some recent interpretations, these theories claimed that the community as a whole could collectively govern itself and did not need to delegate this power to a king or council. The Jesuits’ unique contribution to the idea of popular sovereignty can be best understood with reference to the idea of “translation”– that the community possesses its own political power and can either retain it or transfer it via contract.
“John Locke’s Early Tolerationism: A Critique of the Conversion Narrative,” Journal of the History of Ideas 87, no. 1 (2026).
Locke scholars generally agree that the Essay Concerning Toleration (1667) represents a recantation of his “intolerant” Tracts (1660–62). However, this conversion narrative is based on comparisons between the Tracts and Essay that fail to distinguish the different audiences and aims of these works. The Tracts and Essay are two separate appeals to the two parties of the political-theological conflict of Restoration England. The Tracts appeal to subjects in an attempt to persuade them to obey the sovereign in indifferent matters. The Essay appeals to the sovereign, advising him to widely tolerate religious worship in order to reduce political conflict.
Francisco de Vitoria (c. 1485–1546) is well-known for his philosophical contributions to natural rights and international law. However, his extensive work on the conflict between civil authority and the authority of the Catholic Church has been largely neglected by political theorists and intellectual historians. While scholars have recently recognized the significant role played by natural law in the history of political secularism, they have focused almost exclusively on the “modern” natural law theories of Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Thomasius, as opposed to the “scholastic” natural law of early modern Thomists like Vitoria. This essay undertakes an analysis of Vitoria’s use of natural law theory in his approach to civil–ecclesiastical conflict. Contrary to critiques from the “modern” natural lawyers, it argues that Vitoria’s idea of natural law spearheads a forceful defense of the autonomy of civil power from ecclesiastical power. Based on his sharp distinction between the natural and the supernatural spheres of human life, Vitoria argues for a “dualist” position in which civil and ecclesiastical powers are independent and equally binding on human consciences. The essay acknowledges that Vitoria’s dualism ultimately gives way to his endorsement of papal supremacy over all Christian princes. However, this papalist conclusion does not follow from Vitoria’s natural law theory but rather from an opposing political principle: the notion of the universal Christian commonwealth.
This article explores the emergence of a central feature of modern constitutionalism during a period of intense political conflict between the members of the Society of Jesus and the defenders of absolute monarchical authority in England and France. The crucial idea to emerge from this debate was that although political authority in general is ordained by God, it is most immediately shaped by human hands and is subject to the judgment of the entire body of citizens. Against Jesuit attempts to secularize the idea of the state, absolutists sought to sacralize civil authority in an attempt to shore up state sovereignty against the threats of popular resistance and ecclesiastical encroachment. They thus turned to the notion of ‘divine right’ as a strategy for bringing all secular and ecclesiastical authority under the control of a single sovereign. The article argues that these Jesuit thinkers re-shaped the natural law theories of Aquinas, Cajetan and Vitoria in order to arrive at the idea of the secular constitutional state: a civil authority constituted by the entire commonwealth and placed by the commonwealth under legal limits. Particular attention is given to four Jesuit thinkers: Luis Molina, Robert Bellarmine, Francisco Suárez and Juan de Mariana.
Nathaniel Mull 